Read:

Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self:

Space and Time in the "Voyages extraordinaires"

William Butcher

with a Foreword by Ray Bradbury

Macmillan and St Martin’s Press, 1990

The works of Jules Verne have
undergone a major re-evaluation in France in recent years, based on a
recognition of their sustained literary value and their unique influence on
subsequent creative writers. In Britain, however, no full-length scholarly
study of Verne had appeared before 1990.

It is this remarkable gap, where
the bestselling writer of all time—and the only Frenchman to have achieved
truly universal renown—is either unknown or travestied, that Dr Butcher
brilliantly fills here. His detailed study of the themes and structures
shows that they all lead ineluctably back to the author: that the self is at
the centre of even the apparently most impersonal works.